Spain Blocks Archive.today Without a Court Order, Redirecting Users to an 'Illegal Website' Warning
Spain Orders Blocks on Archive.today and Its Mirrors
Spain's Intellectual Property Commission has ordered the blocking of Archive.today and its mirrors, with no court ruling required. Spanish users are now redirected to a government page declaring they are trying to access an "illegal" website and accusing them of facilitating copyright infringement. The block relies on a complaint and a censorship protocol built for speed.
The page then warns that by trying to access the content, the user "is contributing to an illegal and criminal activity, and putting at risk your own security, that of your data and devices."
- peri-cl
- nottorp
Apparently all of south western europe blocks half the internet in the name of football. Besides Spain there's also Italy, France, Portugal and surprisingly the UK somewhat.
- coopykins
Every single day, I find another reason to be ashamed of my country. We're on a speedrun to turn a modern democratic country into a corrupt shithole in every way imaginable.
- nickreese
Fun fact I learned in Spain recently. They block Cloudflare Edge IPs during soccer games. Took me a long time to figure out why I was having intermittent outages.
- anonzzzies
Not sure what they are doing, but I am in Spain; most non tech people friends who like football have a little 'device' they get from their local friendly 'internet installer' which gives them free(-ish; they pay a few Euro per month, I guess for the VPN?) football (+ any other tv/movies/etc). And this is non tech friends who wouldn't know what a VPN is for the 1 million$ question on that show. So clearly it's all kind of useless (we know).
And so far Starlink (I cannot get anything else on my farm) seems to not have joined in the fun; I can reach anything still; probably not a big enough target.
- usernametaken29
We’ll wait a minute here! Why not call it LLM-archive.today???
Obviously we’re not trying to hurt someone’s copyright!!! We’re making a derivative work from it!!! An LLM! So Europe can be cool too!!
Oh but you’re saying downloading the entire internet in the process violates someone’s copyright??
Well now, don’t be dramatic, what if we fall behind China?? Surely a little copyright can be violated for that.
/rant that I have in my head whenever someone complains to the government about copyright. Either charge LLM providers for copyright violations, or be done with it, and declare copyright dead. Can’t have it both ways, or sooner or later people will figure out a loophole to it anyways.
- janandonly
Access to information feels to me like a human right. Blocking that by any means (legal blockade, price unrealistic high) feels like an infringement on a Human Right.
I know this isn’t the way the world works yet, but a Human can dream.
- pantulis
Spaniard here, it's interesting that I haven't noticed any disruption with archive.is in the last weeks. Just checked today and though that it might be iCloud relay, but i don't have it enabled. I'm only using Google's DNS and am too lazy to try with my ISP ones.
Compare this to the absolute mayhem with the soccer matches blocking that will bring down an inordinate amount of legitimate sites during a match.
Not sure what are the technical measures they are deploying in one case or the other but I suspect that when Telefonica is involved they bring the big guns.
- anilakar
The Kremlin troll admin has already blocked my country, nothing of value was lost.
https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...
- hk1337
Isn’t that site the one the maintainer is known for altering pages or something?